Before you do anything else in this election season, turn to the excerpt of the sample ballot at the bottom of this column.

You're asked to pick one of three people for a Santa Clara County judgeship -- incumbent Diane Ritchie, prosecutor Matthew Harris and defense attorney Annrae Angel.

It's hard to mark a manual ballot by mistake. So here's today's piece of advice: If you do nothing else when you vote, do not connect the arrow to the right of Diane Ritchie's name.

You can connect the arrow for Harris or Angel. You can decide not to vote. At all costs, however, leave the Ritchie arrow unconnected. This woman does not deserve re-election.

Yes, I know this race is far down the ballot. If you live in San Jose, you can vote in a mayor's race that has huge import for the city. You may get to choose in the lively congressional primary among Mike Honda, Ro Khanna and two other candidates.

A judgeship doesn't seem to cry for attention. But the case of Diane Ritchie is different. She is the first sitting local judge to be challenged in 16 years. In an extraordinary rebuke, the Santa Clara Bar Association has found her to be "unqualified."

Our news pages have described how difficult she has found the transition to being a judge in her five years on the bench. She once asked a property manager to translate in a matter that involved his tenant complaining about substandard conditions.

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On another occasion, she asked a man appearing before her on petty theft charges for his telephone number so she could meet him socially.

Supervising deputy district attorney Cindy Hendrickson, a woman whose judgment I trust, says that Ritchie's presence on the bench "undermines the integrity of the judicial system in Santa Clara County."

Video of interview

I didn't really know how profound Ritchie's problems were until I saw the interview of her before the Mercury News editorial board. (See http://goo.gl/7ksP67.) Her performance made ordinary ignorance look like a shining beacon of wisdom.

At one point, she defended an extraordinary $40,000 fine she levied against a laborer/contractor who had let his workers' comp insurance lapse by saying that she had no choice under the law. But the law expressly includes the word "or," which gives the judge other options, like weekend work duty.

Ritchie also insisted that a judge has no right to dismiss a criminal charge filed by the prosecutor. Her opponents were able to cite a penal code section, 1385, that allows judges to do precisely that.

She capped it off by claiming that the Mercury News, with the exception of a laudatory obituary on Tom Cain, did not do positive stories on judges. That was simply wrong: Among others, the paper has done sympathetic pieces on Sharon Chatman and the now-deceased Paul Teilh.

We elect judges, or at least approve them, for a reason. The job is an important one. We employ them. In this case, sadly, the employee needs to find another line of work. Don't connect that arrow.